I've Been There
by Virogtheconq
Summary: The (deep?) thoughts of a grunt on the front lines. Draft copy, so please read the author's notes beforehand. Rated for language and graphic content. Review please: (constructive) flames welcomed with open appendages.
1. Draft

This is a fic-in-creation; it's too long the way it is now, and I need it to be cut, so I'm just uploading this to see which parts should be cut and which should be kept. If you recognize any bits and pieces, I've pulled inspirations from various books/shorts that I've read, but I've warped them so they're entirely my own. Therefore, any resemblence this has to any published work is entirely coincidental (except for one scene and some vocabulary). I'll try to list the inspirational works at the bottom, but there are probably some that I'll forget about.  
  
Also, any paragraphs that have been marked with a / are ones that I've decided really don't belong, but are too (cute?) to get rid of.  
  
Disclaimers: I do not own Starcraft nor any of the characters or ideas contained therein - Blizzard Entertainment has the dubious honor of that. Likewise, neither do I garner any monetary benefit from this endeavour, so I suppose I can't really be sued for it, now can I? Oh yeah, and I don't own any of the works listed at the end, either.  
  
  
  
  
I've Been There  
  
  
  
You call us meat. Zerg munchies. Cannon fodder. Whatever the name, it doesn't matter. They all mean the same thing. We're expendables, the ones that you guys laugh at as we march off to our deaths. Officially, we're Marines, members of the Fourth Battalion of Gamma Squadron, Second Company. We're the pride of the Dominion armed forces and bulk of special attack forces. But we call ourselves grunts. Normal infantry doesn't stand a chance in the depths of space; even the smallest warrior of the Zerg species can rip a man in two without a second thought. Our armor protects us like no other; we can take even TWO hits before busting apart. So, in most cases, we're called out to do the dirty work of the xenophobic politicians and bureaucrats, not to mention those back home who have no idea what it means to be filling some alien's ass full of lead. Not that it matters. Most the guys in my squad would just as soon eat a Protoss as hug one.  
  
  
I remember reading stories about soldiers, back when Earth was still just a single planet, who couldn't stand the stress of battle. Candy-asses, pansies, craven soldiers who couldn't stand the smell of blood or the sight of strewn body parts. Back in those days, soldiers could, and would, shoot themselves in the leg or in the foot just to be shipped out of the war zone. They'd feel pain for a few minutes, then the rescue chopper comes down, picks them up, and off they go, back home to a normal life with a nice medal attached to their uniform for their service to the military. With the miracles wrought by technology these days, that never happens anymore. If someone takes a bullet in the leg, along comes a medic with whatever shit they have in their kits and presto! no more oozing blood onto foreign soil, no more spilling your guts into the maws of the most terrifying creatures on this side of hell. Even massive tissue trauma can't get us out; I've met some guys who took their whole leg off, hoping a debilitating injury could get them off. Medic! they cried. I need evac; I can't go on! Then some damn surgeon came along and *poof*: shiny cybernetic replacement: tougher, stronger, better than the real thing. There are only two kinds of wounds that you can get recalled for. The first one hard to get; besides, I'd rather not spend the rest of my life as a drooling quadrapelegic, wires entering my back where my spine should be. The second is a lot easier, one which my commanding officer found just last week; unfortunately, most heads don't grow back.  
  
  
Life is cheap out here. I've crawled through the guts of a Zerg cerebrate slimier than a hydra's enema. I've hiked through jungles more humid than week-old laundry. I've rappelled into volcanoes deeper than the well of bullshit Emperor Mengsk uses for his speeches, and I've seen good men die in more ways than the brass have for cleaning up after them. I've smelled burnt flesh as hundreds of Zerg workers were vaped as target practice; I've felt the psionic death screams as defenseless Protoss were mowed down to set the feelings right of some politician whose home had been burned as a safeguard against the Swarm. I've heard the cries of my men as they beg for their life in front of some alien who doesn't care, and never will, and stood impassively as their whimpers became a pathetic gargle from a slashed throat. Wading through rivers of blood and the knee-deep dead may sound too poetic for a dumb grunt like me, but I've been there. I've been there, and hate myself for it. I just want to go home.  
  
  
But I can't go home. I'm a killer. I've killed hundreds of aliens of all varieties, some of which I probably never even saw when I blew their asses apart. I've even killed the same alien twice; damn Protoss have some way to reincarnate or bring back their dead and put them in those huge tanks of theirs. I mean, those things are twice the size of the troop carriers we're brought out to fight them in, and they only need one fucking operator to run the damn thing. During one battle, I charged a Protoss who was busy slicing my guys apart with those weird blades of theirs. He nearly got me, too; while overpowering my sergeant and forcing the blade into his chest, the ugly's free arm shot out and took out my liver. He must've thought that he had won; his shield dropped, so I pulled out my lucky souvenir hydra claw and gave him a goodbye present across his ass-ugly little face. Then a sniper blasted Ugly's arm off and left a good dent in his skull, and I managed to crawl back to the carrier before my intestines could worm their way out of my gut. We had to retreat after that, but I got my revenge on them; about a year later my squad had just finished hosing down a goon, and this body flops out with a huge scar across its face. Not many soldiers get to kill the same bastard twice; however, just to make sure they didn't plug this guy back into a goon one more time, I have his head sitting next to my lucky hydra claw in the barracks.  
  
  
/You've seen the vids. The ones where you see the thousands of smiling troops proudly saluting command flagships as they fly overhead, banners waving as smoke drifts over the carcasses of burning Zerg. The clips where a squad of grunts hose down a wave of teenaged guerillas fleeing a rebel enclave, and enemy goons popping in a spray of blue fluid, red blood and white light. The tracks where some candy-assed reporter stays hidden in his safe little bunker and narrates the battle as we "fight the good fight." I've seen it all, and it's all bullshit. Fucking propaganda. I mean, I've never been in an operation where some fancy pinstriped general who calls a rifle a "gun" doesn't manage to fuck up the easiest cleanup and send our guys to their deaths. Correction, I mean my guys. Troops I've worked with since I entered the military, and know better than my ex-wife's dead cat, have died when Mr. General Look-I-Graduated-From-a-Military-Academy sends us into a place where he knows we have less than a snowball's chance in hell of surviving, and then sits back to smoke his "victory" cigars and congratulates himself on saving the expense of air support with the lives of a couple of our guys. In my book, a death is only worth dying if it can't be avoided, and sometimes not even then. The top brass can command a squad of grunts like my ass chews gum; it doesn't work and smells bad, too.  
  
  
We've got names for everything. I mean, grunt names; slang that we use so the officers can't tell what we're talking about, so we can ride their asses about their mistakes and they won't know it. Everything means more than one thing: "Look, Johnny got fragged by crabs" either means Johnny got splattered by what the brass calls "Guardians," or it means I scratched off my balls from the fucking jock itch those damn suits give us. We call SCVs "lazies;" little bastards get to ride around in those damn armored suits, building stuff and retreating when we need to protect their shiny metal asses. Hell, they don't need my help; those little welders they have protect them well enough, and there are plently of other guys who could use a shoulder to die on. Those damn guys who call themselves "Ghosts;" now, if there was somebody who ever needed a mommy, it would be those bastards. We call them ghosts, too, but I think it's wrong; they don't even have a soul left to haunt us. Only thing they're good for is setting stuff on fire with those pretty nukes of their's; fucking pansies can't even hold their ground in an open firefight, but hey, they get rewarded for it anyways. Although I must admit, seeing a flight of mutes frag in midair from a nuke shockwave is more beautiful than the the parts we collect afterwards. . We have nicknames for all the other guys we fight and frag on a daily basis; however, we usually refer to them as Uglies. That way, we don't feel bad about busting their pretty little faces. Some of us call them immortals: it's not that they can't die, it's just that they're always coming back for more.  
  
  
The brass reward stupidity out here. I've got three medals on my suit: the first one I got as a greenie, when I mistook the barrel of my Impaler for the breech. Wonders of medical technology; the implants grew new eyes is less than a month and now I'm not even colorblind. The second one is only a little less stupid, and it wasn't my fault; damn tank commanders don't give a shit who's in their fucking blast radius as long as there's a target in there. The last medal is one for valor; I was leading a charge after drugging myself up, and some Zergling dodged my fire and nailed my right leg into the creep. I would have died if some unknown grunt hadn't stopped to provide cover fire so I could get evac'ed. I never learned the guy's name; I had pulled myself two feet back when a huge ball slammed into the ground, spraying mucus and acid everywhere. The grunt's body was ripped apart in the explosion and left a spray of blood wider than the crab who had killed him. Then a wing of fighters came screaming in from the west and stitched laser fire over the bastard's ass (or maybe it was its mouth), blowing it into pieces and soaking the ground with its guts. That air commander probably got a shitload of commendations for providing "air support" after we'd already gotten our butts kicked. If anyone deserved a medal, it should have been that grunt: he had more balls than anyone else I've ever seen, and got himself killed for it. Those fucking pansies in the air never would've launched if they'd been in any danger at all.  
  
  
I hate spaceships. Especially those damn fighter jocks who get to sit around on their asses all day, then flit around for half an hour until they get recalled, where they get nice medals for completing missions. Meanwhile, we get to dig in and camp out until those guys get their butts moving and can plug the guys who have us pinned down from above and below, and then we have to THANK them afterwards! Oh yeah, sometimes they can get the short end of it, too. But a nice clean death, surrounded by heat and light is better than spewing your guts all over some godforsaken alien's claws on a hellishly cold rock in some distant corner of the Dominion not even geologists care about. Plus, I'd rather buy it on my own feet, with maybe the littlest chance of shooting back, than huddle inside the cold metal hold of a dropship waiting for death to overtake you, rifles uselessly held in our hands. And if things are a little too hairy for evac, tough shit for us; Command'd rather let us all die than scratch the shiny plating on the hulls of their ships. In all my time here, I've seen over a thousand boys die like that; spaceships look better on camera and paper than we do, so we get to pay the price for our ugliness by being fed to the Zerg.  
  
  
/We've all been taught in kiddie school not to use mind-altering drugs, that they ruin our brains faster than a bullet. That's why we refer to the stims as "mind-expanding;" they keep our mind intact by killing the rest of our bodies. Less than one milliliter is enough to send you into a dream state, where you don't really care about the pain and fear, and all you can feel is rage. Less than one milliliter. Standard dosage on one of these bastards is about ten. At that level, even emotion goes away, and the only thing you can really feel is the gun in your hand and the snot dripping out of your nose. If it wasn't for those damn implants that keep us from running away, we'd frag each other with the enemy; actually, I've seen guys do that, but they usually were taken down by an Ugly before they could kill our own grunts.  
  
  
/To a man, a single Zergling is about the size of a dog, only a lot stronger, but just as easy to kill. But one man can't take down a pack of wolves, and Zergling can spawn faster than it takes me to take a shit. Isn't there any place these creatures can't live and fight? I've been exposed to the naked vacuum of space, protected only by three inches of steel, and seen these bastards walking around on the surface of spaceships, little grapples in their feet securing them to the plating. They don't need oxygen to live, and their carapace is so hard their internals are kept inside, nice and cozy. That is, until a bullet cracks it the tiniest bit and their entrails spew out in a silent explosion of color. Sound doesn't travel in space, but I swear those hellspawn Zerg can feel the pain I inflict on them. And I like it.  
  
  
Two of my friends died last week. Well, maybe I shouldn't say friends: I only got to know them for a month before they cashed in. Slippy Bowles, the first, died from stupidity. You NEVER turn your back on the enemy, even when they're good as dead. We had trapped a horde of Zerg in a narrow defile, them coming from the south, us above and north. I don't think they ever saw us. That is, until Pvt. Bowles, stops firing, stands, turns to me and says, "Heh heh, Sarge, lookit 'em bleed. They ain't seemin' so tough ta me!" Then the hydra spine busted out of his skull and splattered his brains on my suit. He didn't say anything, just rolled his eyes into his head and toppled over the side. I never did see the bastard who killed him: Two squads of tanks rolled in from the north and squashed 'em flatter than yesterday's soda. Afterward, they took Bowles' suit, sterilized it, splashed on some paint remover and handed it to the next rookie.  
  
The second death wasn't his fault. It was nobody's fault, except maybe the guy who decided that a frontal assault into a network of caverns was better than burning them out. Pvt. McShane was new, but we all liked him. He was a better shot than me, and filled a stimpack with some "happy water." He said it kept the edge off the fear and the pain; I hope he used it during his last sweet lucid moments of torment and horror before he cashed in. Second Company had been designated as the sweeper guys, the ones who clear out the last pockets of resistance. Surface scans don't penetrate that deeply into the ground, so we were carrying portable equipment with us. The metallic content of the rock and ore surrounding us limited our scan radius, so my squad was bunched up into a tight box. Our first inkling that something was wrong was when the scanner quit functioning altogether. The second was the ominous dripping noise, until I figured out that Pvt. Poltrün had a biological leak in the nether regions. I had my guys spread out into a loose diamond and switch to infrared imaging, in case some Zerg got smart and decided to charge us before we could pick them up. I detailed McShane to repair the scanner. When he finally got the damn thing to work, the first thing out of his mouth, and the last he ever said, was "Shit." Then the ground in front of me exploded into a series of two meter spines, boiling into a wave of pikes hurling themselves toward my men and embedding themselves into the rock above. McShane had started to turn around, and was facing me when a shaft punched through his ass and pinned him to the ceiling. He never even had a chance. I can still remember his face: his eyes and mouth wide open with shock and surprise, a stream of blood pouring from his head, his arms dangling limply at his sides as he hung, a new stalactite in that bloody cavern. I racked off a couple of grenades, then we high-tailed it out of there as a wave of Zergling charged us. We never managed to recover McShane's body; the next squad that went in there found just his suit hanging from the ceiling, all his flesh and bone party to some new Zerg strain. Two weeks later, his mother got a nice letter from the office of the Marine Corps, saying "unfortunately, his body could not be recovered, but let it be known your son died bravely and heroically in defense of his race." Period, end of sentence, storytime's over, next rookie please. At times like that, I think I would have been better off as a janitor. At least my unrecognized death would have been in a familiar setting, surrounded by people who benefit from my work. Both McShane and Bowles hadn't been around long enough to even kill one xenoform before their asses got cooked, and recognition only comes to those who spill more of the enemy's blood than their own.  
  
  
I used to write letters home to my mother and wife once a week. After the divorce, the letters got shorter and fewer, and soon it was a paragraph or two, once a month. Now, people only know of me whenever my name shows up on some roster of grunts who haven't died yet. I'd like to think I got lost in the shuffle, but I know what they say back home: I'm a SOLDIER, I'm mean and cruel and like to hurt other people. That may be true, actually, it IS true, but I'm mean and cruel because they didn't want to get their fucking hands dirty with someone else's blood. They've made me what I am, but pretend that I did it myself. We get showered in praise when we're away, but when we get home, we get soaked in revulsion. That's why I keep coming back; the impartiality of the battlefield became the only place I feel at home. At home, with one foot in the grave and the other up an Ugly's ass. One of these days, that other foot's going to drop, and then my fat momma's going to sing. But that's okay. I've seen it all, I've done it all, I hate it all, and I'm ready to leave.  
  
  
I've been there.  
  
  
  
  
  
A/N: Inspirational works:   
The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien (highly recommended read)  
Happy Birthday Wanda June - Kurt Vonnegut (highly recommended play)  
Heir to the Empire - Timothy Zahn   
Some random Starship Troopers comic series (McShane scene heavily modified from the first issue in this 3-part series)  
Myth II: Soulblighter - Bungie   
A River Runs Through it - Paul Maclean  
  
So, let me know which parts you liked/hated, and feel free to flame them too. Provided I get enough input, I'll take this down and repost it later. 


	2. IBT Revised

This is a fic-in-creation; it's too long the way it is now, and I need it to be cut, so I'm just uploading this to see which parts should be cut and which should be kept. If you recognize any bits and pieces, I've pulled inspirations from various books/shorts that I've read, but I've warped them so they're entirely my own. Therefore, any resemblence this has to any published work is entirely coincidental (except for one scene and some vocabulary). I'll try to list the inspirational works at the bottom, but there are probably some that I'll forget about.  
  
Also, any paragraphs that have been marked with a / are ones that I've decided really don't belong, but are too (cute?) to get rid of.  
  
Disclaimers: I do not own Starcraft nor any of the characters or ideas contained therein - Blizzard Entertainment has the dubious honor of that. Likewise, neither do I garner any monetary benefit from this endeavour, so I suppose I can't really be sued for it, now can I? Oh yeah, and I don't own any of the works listed at the end, either.  
  
  
  
  
I've Been There  
  
  
  
You call us meat. Zerg munchies. Cannon fodder. Whatever the name, it doesn't matter. They all mean the same thing. We're expendables, the ones that you guys laugh at as we march off to our deaths. Officially, we're Marines, members of the Fourth Battalion of Gamma Squadron, Second Company. We're the pride of the Dominion armed forces and bulk of special attack forces. But we call ourselves grunts. Normal infantry doesn't stand a chance in the depths of space; even the smallest warrior of the Zerg species can rip a man in two without a second thought. Our armor protects us like no other; we can take even TWO hits before busting apart. So, in most cases, we're called out to do the dirty work of the xenophobic politicians and bureaucrats, not to mention those back home who have no idea what it means to be filling some alien's ass full of lead. Not that it matters. Most the guys in my squad would just as soon eat a Protoss as hug one.  
  
  
I remember reading stories about soldiers, back when Earth was still just a single planet, who couldn't stand the stress of battle. Candy-asses, pansies, craven soldiers who couldn't stand the smell of blood or the sight of strewn body parts. Back in those days, soldiers could, and would, shoot themselves in the leg or in the foot just to be shipped out of the war zone. They'd feel pain for a few minutes, then the rescue chopper comes down, picks them up, and off they go, back home to a normal life with a nice medal attached to their uniform for their service to the military. With the miracles wrought by technology these days, that never happens anymore. If someone takes a bullet in the leg, along comes a medic with whatever shit they have in their kits and presto! no more oozing blood onto foreign soil, no more spilling your guts into the maws of the most terrifying creatures on this side of hell. Even massive tissue trauma can't get us out; I've met some guys who took their whole leg off, hoping a debilitating injury could get them off. Medic! they cried. I need evac; I can't go on! Then some damn surgeon came along and *poof*: shiny cybernetic replacement: tougher, stronger, better than the real thing. There are only two kinds of wounds that you can get recalled for. The first one hard to get; besides, I'd rather not spend the rest of my life as a drooling quadrapelegic, wires entering my back where my spine should be. The second is a lot easier, one which my commanding officer found just last week; unfortunately, most heads don't grow back.  
  
  
Life is cheap out here. I've crawled through the guts of a Zerg cerebrate slimier than a hydra's enema. I've hiked through jungles more humid than week-old laundry. I've rappelled into volcanoes deeper than the well of bullshit Emperor Mengsk uses for his speeches, and I've seen good men die in more ways than the brass have for cleaning up after them. I've smelled burnt flesh as hundreds of Zerg workers were vaped as target practice; I've felt the psionic death screams as defenseless Protoss were mowed down to set the feelings right of some politician whose home had been burned as a safeguard against the Swarm. I've heard the cries of my men as they beg for their life in front of some alien who doesn't care, and never will, and stood impassively as their whimpers became a pathetic gargle from a slashed throat. Wading through rivers of blood and the knee-deep dead may sound too poetic for a dumb grunt like me, but I've been there. I've been there, and hate myself for it. I just want to go home.  
  
  
But I can't go home. I'm a killer. I've killed hundreds of aliens of all varieties, some of which I probably never even saw when I blew their asses apart. I've even killed the same alien twice; damn Protoss have some way to reincarnate or bring back their dead and put them in those huge tanks of theirs. I mean, those things are twice the size of the troop carriers we're brought out to fight them in, and they only need one fucking operator to run the damn thing. During one battle, I charged a Protoss who was busy slicing my guys apart with those weird blades of theirs. He nearly got me, too; while overpowering my sergeant and forcing the blade into his chest, the ugly's free arm shot out and took out my liver. He must've thought that he had won; his shield dropped, so I pulled out my lucky souvenir hydra claw and gave him a goodbye present across his ass-ugly little face. Then a sniper blasted Ugly's arm off and left a good dent in his skull, and I managed to crawl back to the carrier before my intestines could worm their way out of my gut. We had to retreat after that, but I got my revenge on them; about a year later my squad had just finished hosing down a goon, and this body flops out with a huge scar across its face. Not many soldiers get to kill the same bastard twice; however, just to make sure they didn't plug this guy back into a goon one more time, I have his head sitting next to my lucky hydra claw in the barracks.  
  
  
/You've seen the vids. The ones where you see the thousands of smiling troops proudly saluting command flagships as they fly overhead, banners waving as smoke drifts over the carcasses of burning Zerg. The clips where a squad of grunts hose down a wave of teenaged guerillas fleeing a rebel enclave, and enemy goons popping in a spray of blue fluid, red blood and white light. The tracks where some candy-assed reporter stays hidden in his safe little bunker and narrates the battle as we "fight the good fight." I've seen it all, and it's all bullshit. Fucking propaganda. I mean, I've never been in an operation where some fancy pinstriped general who calls a rifle a "gun" doesn't manage to fuck up the easiest cleanup and send our guys to their deaths. Correction, I mean my guys. Troops I've worked with since I entered the military, and know better than my ex-wife's dead cat, have died when Mr. General Look-I-Graduated-From-a-Military-Academy sends us into a place where he knows we have less than a snowball's chance in hell of surviving, and then sits back to smoke his "victory" cigars and congratulates himself on saving the expense of air support with the lives of a couple of our guys. In my book, a death is only worth dying if it can't be avoided, and sometimes not even then. The top brass can command a squad of grunts like my ass chews gum; it doesn't work and smells bad, too.  
  
  
We've got names for everything. I mean, grunt names; slang that we use so the officers can't tell what we're talking about, so we can ride their asses about their mistakes and they won't know it. Everything means more than one thing: "Look, Johnny got fragged by crabs" either means Johnny got splattered by what the brass calls "Guardians," or it means I scratched off my balls from the fucking jock itch those damn suits give us. We call SCVs "lazies;" little bastards get to ride around in those damn armored suits, building stuff and retreating when we need to protect their shiny metal asses. Hell, they don't need my help; those little welders they have protect them well enough, and there are plently of other guys who could use a shoulder to die on. Those damn guys who call themselves "Ghosts;" now, if there was somebody who ever needed a mommy, it would be those bastards. We call them ghosts, too, but I think it's wrong; they don't even have a soul left to haunt us. Only thing they're good for is setting stuff on fire with those pretty nukes of their's; fucking pansies can't even hold their ground in an open firefight, but hey, they get rewarded for it anyways. Although I must admit, seeing a flight of mutes frag in midair from a nuke shockwave is more beautiful than the the parts we collect afterwards. . We have nicknames for all the other guys we fight and frag on a daily basis; however, we usually refer to them as Uglies. That way, we don't feel bad about busting their pretty little faces. Some of us call them immortals: it's not that they can't die, it's just that they're always coming back for more.  
  
  
The brass reward stupidity out here. I've got three medals on my suit: the first one I got as a greenie, when I mistook the barrel of my Impaler for the breech. Wonders of medical technology; the implants grew new eyes is less than a month and now I'm not even colorblind. The second one is only a little less stupid, and it wasn't my fault; damn tank commanders don't give a shit who's in their fucking blast radius as long as there's a target in there. The last medal is one for valor; I was leading a charge after drugging myself up, and some Zergling dodged my fire and nailed my right leg into the creep. I would have died if some unknown grunt hadn't stopped to provide cover fire so I could get evac'ed. I never learned the guy's name; I had pulled myself two feet back when a huge ball slammed into the ground, spraying mucus and acid everywhere. The grunt's body was ripped apart in the explosion and left a spray of blood wider than the crab who had killed him. Then a wing of fighters came screaming in from the west and stitched laser fire over the bastard's ass (or maybe it was its mouth), blowing it into pieces and soaking the ground with its guts. That air commander probably got a shitload of commendations for providing "air support" after we'd already gotten our butts kicked. If anyone deserved a medal, it should have been that grunt: he had more balls than anyone else I've ever seen, and got himself killed for it. Those fucking pansies in the air never would've launched if they'd been in any danger at all.  
  
  
I hate spaceships. Especially those damn fighter jocks who get to sit around on their asses all day, then flit around for half an hour until they get recalled, where they get nice medals for completing missions. Meanwhile, we get to dig in and camp out until those guys get their butts moving and can plug the guys who have us pinned down from above and below, and then we have to THANK them afterwards! Oh yeah, sometimes they can get the short end of it, too. But a nice clean death, surrounded by heat and light is better than spewing your guts all over some godforsaken alien's claws on a hellishly cold rock in some distant corner of the Dominion not even geologists care about. Plus, I'd rather buy it on my own feet, with maybe the littlest chance of shooting back, than huddle inside the cold metal hold of a dropship waiting for death to overtake you, rifles uselessly held in our hands. And if things are a little too hairy for evac, tough shit for us; Command'd rather let us all die than scratch the shiny plating on the hulls of their ships. In all my time here, I've seen over a thousand boys die like that; spaceships look better on camera and paper than we do, so we get to pay the price for our ugliness by being fed to the Zerg.  
  
  
/We've all been taught in kiddie school not to use mind-altering drugs, that they ruin our brains faster than a bullet. That's why we refer to the stims as "mind-expanding;" they keep our mind intact by killing the rest of our bodies. Less than one milliliter is enough to send you into a dream state, where you don't really care about the pain and fear, and all you can feel is rage. Less than one milliliter. Standard dosage on one of these bastards is about ten. At that level, even emotion goes away, and the only thing you can really feel is the gun in your hand and the snot dripping out of your nose. If it wasn't for those damn implants that keep us from running away, we'd frag each other with the enemy; actually, I've seen guys do that, but they usually were taken down by an Ugly before they could kill our own grunts.  
  
  
/To a man, a single Zergling is about the size of a dog, only a lot stronger, but just as easy to kill. But one man can't take down a pack of wolves, and Zergling can spawn faster than it takes me to take a shit. Isn't there any place these creatures can't live and fight? I've been exposed to the naked vacuum of space, protected only by three inches of steel, and seen these bastards walking around on the surface of spaceships, little grapples in their feet securing them to the plating. They don't need oxygen to live, and their carapace is so hard their internals are kept inside, nice and cozy. That is, until a bullet cracks it the tiniest bit and their entrails spew out in a silent explosion of color. Sound doesn't travel in space, but I swear those hellspawn Zerg can feel the pain I inflict on them. And I like it.  
  
  
Two of my friends died last week. Well, maybe I shouldn't say friends: I only got to know them for a month before they cashed in. Slippy Bowles, the first, died from stupidity. You NEVER turn your back on the enemy, even when they're good as dead. We had trapped a horde of Zerg in a narrow defile, them coming from the south, us above and north. I don't think they ever saw us. That is, until Pvt. Bowles, stops firing, stands, turns to me and says, "Heh heh, Sarge, lookit 'em bleed. They ain't seemin' so tough ta me!" Then the hydra spine busted out of his skull and splattered his brains on my suit. He didn't say anything, just rolled his eyes into his head and toppled over the side. I never did see the bastard who killed him: Two squads of tanks rolled in from the north and squashed 'em flatter than yesterday's soda. Afterward, they took Bowles' suit, sterilized it, splashed on some paint remover and handed it to the next rookie.  
  
The second death wasn't his fault. It was nobody's fault, except maybe the guy who decided that a frontal assault into a network of caverns was better than burning them out. Pvt. McShane was new, but we all liked him. He was a better shot than me, and filled a stimpack with some "happy water." He said it kept the edge off the fear and the pain; I hope he used it during his last sweet lucid moments of torment and horror before he cashed in. Second Company had been designated as the sweeper guys, the ones who clear out the last pockets of resistance. Surface scans don't penetrate that deeply into the ground, so we were carrying portable equipment with us. The metallic content of the rock and ore surrounding us limited our scan radius, so my squad was bunched up into a tight box. Our first inkling that something was wrong was when the scanner quit functioning altogether. The second was the ominous dripping noise, until I figured out that Pvt. Poltrün had a biological leak in the nether regions. I had my guys spread out into a loose diamond and switch to infrared imaging, in case some Zerg got smart and decided to charge us before we could pick them up. I detailed McShane to repair the scanner. When he finally got the damn thing to work, the first thing out of his mouth, and the last he ever said, was "Shit." Then the ground in front of me exploded into a series of two meter spines, boiling into a wave of pikes hurling themselves toward my men and embedding themselves into the rock above. McShane had started to turn around, and was facing me when a shaft punched through his ass and pinned him to the ceiling. He never even had a chance. I can still remember his face: his eyes and mouth wide open with shock and surprise, a stream of blood pouring from his head, his arms dangling limply at his sides as he hung, a new stalactite in that bloody cavern. I racked off a couple of grenades, then we high-tailed it out of there as a wave of Zergling charged us. We never managed to recover McShane's body; the next squad that went in there found just his suit hanging from the ceiling, all his flesh and bone party to some new Zerg strain. Two weeks later, his mother got a nice letter from the office of the Marine Corps, saying "unfortunately, his body could not be recovered, but let it be known your son died bravely and heroically in defense of his race." Period, end of sentence, storytime's over, next rookie please. At times like that, I think I would have been better off as a janitor. At least my unrecognized death would have been in a familiar setting, surrounded by people who benefit from my work. Both McShane and Bowles hadn't been around long enough to even kill one xenoform before their asses got cooked, and recognition only comes to those who spill more of the enemy's blood than their own.  
  
  
I used to write letters home to my mother and wife once a week. After the divorce, the letters got shorter and fewer, and soon it was a paragraph or two, once a month. Now, people only know of me whenever my name shows up on some roster of grunts who haven't died yet. I'd like to think I got lost in the shuffle, but I know what they say back home: I'm a SOLDIER, I'm mean and cruel and like to hurt other people. That may be true, actually, it IS true, but I'm mean and cruel because they didn't want to get their fucking hands dirty with someone else's blood. They've made me what I am, but pretend that I did it myself. We get showered in praise when we're away, but when we get home, we get soaked in revulsion. That's why I keep coming back; the impartiality of the battlefield became the only place I feel at home. At home, with one foot in the grave and the other up an Ugly's ass. One of these days, that other foot's going to drop, and then my fat momma's going to sing. But that's okay. I've seen it all, I've done it all, I hate it all, and I'm ready to leave.  
  
  
I've been there.  
  
  
  
  
  
A/N: Inspirational works:   
The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien (highly recommended read)  
Happy Birthday Wanda June - Kurt Vonnegut (highly recommended play)  
Heir to the Empire - Timothy Zahn   
Some random Starship Troopers comic series (McShane scene heavily modified from the first issue in this 3-part series)  
Myth II: Soulblighter - Bungie   
A River Runs Through it - Paul Maclean  
  
So, let me know which parts you liked/hated, and feel free to flame them too. Provided I get enough input, I'll take this down and repost it later. 


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